This issue of Rural History has greater thematic coherence than previous numbers, with all the papers having some relation to the study of ‘popular culture’, while coming from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Each of the articles develops a key area of analysis, but their juxtaposition helps to raise further questions – about the kinds of sources that can be used to redress the bias towards the elite that has tended to dominate the study of culture, and about the problems involved in the handling of such sources. How do concepts of class, sectional, or gender interest relate to the sense of place and local identity? How can we detect such ideas within the historical record? How should we proceed in attempting to reconstruct popular and regional consciousness?

To deconstruct a map, said Brian Harley, it is necessary to read between the lines and to place the cartographic facts within a specific cultural perspective. He used the ideas of literary critics to make historians of cartography aware that there is more to maps than initially meets the eye and that ‘facts’ are rarely what they first appear to be. By viewing a map as a product of a particular society, one can begin to understand why a map was made in the way it was, how it was used and valued, and its role in representing and transforming contemporary attitudes and perspectives. To search for the wider meaning of local maps, it is usually necessary to make inferences based on research into their backgrounds; one rarely finds documents giving explicit directions on how, and why, a map was to be drawn and decorated. If, as in many past studies in the history of cartography, maps are taken at face value, they can leave many of their secrets unrevealed and, indeed, can easily be misinterpreted.

For the vast majority of men and women in seventeenth-century England the act of marriage created an indissoluble union and represented a life long commitment. Legal divorce was a lengthy and costly procedure which discriminated against women, and informal separations or desertions were socially frowned upon and often economically disadvantageous. So marital discord had to be overcome before it deteriorated into a situation of marriage breakdown. Elaborate ways of restoring and maintaining marital harmony were established through use of the cucking stool and ‘charivari’. By these means, public attention was focused upon behaviour which caused discord: the scolding wife was punished and the husband who was a cuckold or had been beaten by his wife, humiliated. Meanwhile, conduct books proffered advice to couples on how to avoid such marital discontent and its consequences.

‘How came I to be his property? What right has he in me, but such as a thief may plead to stolen goods?’ cried Pamela, the virtuous servant maid of Richardson's novel. Pamela was written in 1740, but the assumption that masters had sexual rights over their servants cast a long shadow. The questions Pamela raises about powerlessness and ‘worth’ are crucial to understanding the plight of female servants in the nineteenth century. This study examines why servants were particularly vulnerable to sexual harassment, the consequences of sexual abuse for victims and offenders, and underlying male attitudes which affected both the incidence of assaults and the justice meted out by the courts.

In one of the earliest issues of Rural History, Jacqueline Simpson urged students of Popular rural culture to examine local legends that centre upon some specific place, Person or object and which are a focus for local pride. Many of these are well-known tales which have been adapted, often in a humorous way, to local circumstances. Thus the seventy-odd stories of dragon-slaying which she has collected for Britain usually depict a local figure, not St George or a knight errant, as the hero. It is normally difficult, if not impossible, to explain how these tales began. The Dragon of Wantley, however, offers some unusual opportunities for delving into the historical context of a ballad that achieved national fame.

Today we can already see a regenerated Ireland, living a new and prosperous life, with a peasantry helped and aided, largely by its own co-operative effort, beyond the peasantry of any other country. Tomorrow we trust to see a self-governing Ireland, still a part of the British Commonwealth. (Barker, Ireland in the Last Fifty Years (1919) 147).

Generations of scholars have analysed and interpreted the events of the Great War which wrought havoc across landscapes of ten départements in northern France (figure 1). By contrast, the processes whereby these areas were restored in the immediate post-war years have received very little attention, although the desperate circumstances in which recovery took place have been powerfully evoked in Bertrand Tavernier's recent film La vie et. rien d'autre (1989). Common problems were encountered throughout the devastated regions but just as the intensity of damage varied between départements so did the speed and efficiency of reconstruction and recovery. Rather than attempting to embrace the revival of urban or industrial life or to explore the complex financial transactions which made all forms of reconstruction possible, the present discussion focuses on the dual imperative of restoring rural land and rebuilding rural settlement within a single département.

This essay began from a continuity, or perhaps a persistence. Working as historians and cultural critics in very different periods, early modern England and the nineteenth-century countryside, we have both been struck for some years by continuities of behaviour in situations of riot or disorder. At one level this was first pointed to in the work of E.P. Thompson and George Rude in relation to eighteenth-century riot. Both these writers argued that far from riot being a spontaneous, anarchic and random event it was nearly always structured and organised. Thompson in particular introduced, through the notion of ‘moral economy’, the idea that rioters shared ideas about ‘right’ which Were related to an earlier customary social and economic order. From a very different, but equally important perspective, we have both been profoundly influenced by the flowering of cultural studies associated with the work of Mikhail Bahktin, and cultural anthropology growing from the work of Victor Turner and Pierre Bourdieu. In these Writers we found arguments about boundaries and structures which were both erected and transgressed by rituals of various kinds. Finally, a very few historians working on riot and popular disorder have been struck by the same continuity, notably, Michael Beames in his study of Whiteboyism, and very recently, Andrew Charlesworth in the Pages of this journal. This brief essay will seek to illuminate our notion of continuity, using some of these ideas. It is offered not as a definitive piece, but rather as an interpretation of some of these materials.

On the outbreak of war in August 1914 landowners in Sussex immediately started to employ their local leadership roles in the cause of voluntary recruiting and in doing so demonstrated the continuing utility of paternalistic social relations and the traditional rural structure to a nation preparing for war. The slow decline in social prestige provided by landownership was far from visible in the military sphere. As members of the military establishment – regular and territorial, past and present – landowners with clearly identifiable local economic, political and leisure interests attended to the search for recruits with the age old expectation that the deferential labourers would follow their ‘betters’ to war. As Alun Howkins has written,‘men were urged to go as much as part of their duty to the social structure of rural areas as to King and Country’.

This essay considers W.G. Hoskins's work as a key part of the post-war English culture of landscape. To paraphrase his most well-known book, Hoskins made a distinctive English landscape. His work, though, has received remarkably little critical attention in terms of English cultural history. D.W. Meinig, in the only essay to treat Hoskins’ work at any length, focusses on his contribution to the genre of landscape studies and the impact of his work in the 1970s through television (Meinig, 1979). This essay seeks to complement Meinig's generic focus, by considering Hoskins in relation to the wider culture of landscape in England after 1945.

In a recent issue of Rural History, Malcolm Chase wrote a somewhat frustrated commentary, ‘Can history be green?’ Against a general intellectual background that was increasingly preoccupied with environmental issues, historical scholarship remained largely impervious to ‘green’ issues. His timely commentary set out the consequences of this neglect for both the environmental movement and the historian.

Academic folklorists today define their subject matter in a way which runs counter to popular conceptions of the field, both as regards the ‘lore’ and the ‘folk’ part of this old composite term. They see the ‘lore’ as a body of beliefs, activities, ways of making, saying and doing things and interacting with others that are acquired through informal, unofficial channels by the processes of socialising in family, occupational, or activity-related groups. The ‘folk’ in the old sense of a group of people distinguishable by class, education or location therefore disappears from the modern equation, for it follows that we are all folk. As academic folklorists use the term nowadays, ‘folklore’ is best seen as a ‘cultural register’ – on the analogy of a linguistic register – one of several options available to members of a cultural grouping for thought, activity and interaction. It follows that ‘folklore’ can be found anywhere and among any group of people, urban as well as rural, professional as well as ‘peasant’.